The Rainbow Girl

One of the hardest things for a writer to take is criticism. I've taken quite a lot recently but to be honest its all been really helpful. Perhaps my toughest critic is my sister Samantha. I let her read things and she rips them apart as woefully melodramatic and repetitive. I have been reworking an old novel for submission to an agent recently, feeling like it was almost there Samantha asked me to read her a little bit. At first I refused point blank, a tirade of tough criticism from her and I wouldn't ever send the book off, but then I came to the conclusion that if my writing had improved then she would be the one to notice it. A no holds barred review is sometimes just what we need.

So.... i sat down to read her a chapter from 'The Rainbow Girl', formerly Being Lucky. She listened, changed a couple of words and then said "Stephanie can I tell you something!" My heart practically stopped. This was it, she was about to completely crush me. "Okay." I braced myself for the death blow. "It's like a thousand times better than it was before. It's really good!"

Fireworks went off. I sat in stunned silence and just stared at her waiting for the 'but'. There was none.

Okay so The Rainbow Girl still needs a few tweaks here and there. It isn't perfect yet and it needs to be but man, if my sister can see how far I've come then surely I'm progressing.

With a week's holiday just around the corner I can happily get my entry ready for Undiscovered Voices, work on my new novel 'Tattooing Angels' and just relish the newfound knowledge that slowly I'm becoming a real, bona fide writer.

My sister has been there for me through a lot of bad stuff recently. She has forgiven me some really massive errors in judgement and she has ultimately been my biggest fan. This photo is of a plate that she bought me in the Lake District earlier this year. I was going through perhaps one of the toughest times I've ever been through and she handed it to me and said it was for inspiration, that it was to help me with my writing because that was where my future was. I hope she was right because I want to prove that by having faith in something that seems almost impossible it can happen.

Writing a Patchwork

Writing is like making a patchwork quilt. You have all these things that don't seem to go together and yet when you put them together they somehow become beautiful. You put your characters in situations that they don't seem to completely fit into and yet the more you write the more they just suddenly seem to belong.

I've been really struggling with an edit that I've been doing. There is this one scene, right near the end of the book that just hasn't been working. It needs to be dramatic, heartbreaking and yet real but at the moment its falling really flat. I've drawn on experiences as much as I can but its kind of out of my expertise. I've rewritten it time and time again to make it work but its eluding me. I need it to be perfect but the characters seem resistent to part and they need to in order for it to work.

People say that you should write what you know but this seems like the actual point of writing. JR Tolkein didn't know hobbits. JK Rowling didn't know wizards and Stephenie Meyer didn't know vampires. We just know people. We know how we feel and we react. We understand the complex network of human emotions that control us and no matter how different we are from the people that we write we know how people feel. SO I guess after that observation I should be able to go back and write the perfect scene. I have to be both characters. I have to feel what they feel and I have to make it work.

Here goes........

New Beginnings

It's really strange starting again. I worked in my last place for eight years and recently started a new job (recently being last Friday). Eight years is such a long time and the place kind of became my prison but it also felt like somewhere that I knew and understood completely. The new place is strange and alien to me. I feel like a fish out of water just flapping around. I had these routines. Every morning I would go to the same Starbucks, would sit in the same place to do some writing and then I'd walk into work. I thought I had friends there, people that I could talk to and tell secrets too. I revealed far too much of myself and that is something I really regret. Now I'm in a new Starbucks, a new seat and I'm still writing. I don't intend to make any of the same mistakes though. A new start means a new perspective. When things go bad you have to look at why they went bad, at where they first started to go wrong and how you can stop it happening again. I think I've pinpointed my main problem. I put too much of myself out there and trusted people too easily. I'm all for trust and honesty but at the end of the day you have to keep a little part of yourself back because not everyone really deserves to see everything. Maybe my writing will benefit from these new changes. There is nothing worse than becoming stale and stuck in the same place but it takes time. My wounds are still fresh and incredibly painful so a new beginning feels like too much too soon.